Departments of Commerce, Justice, and State, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2005

Floor Speech

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Mr. McGOVERN. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Flake-Davis amendment. This amendment will help not the Cuban regime, but this is an amendment that will help the Cuban people.

Mr. Chairman, for the past 5 years, this House and the other body have voted time and time again to lift various U.S. restrictions on travel and on commercial food and medicine sales. Yet this administration has moved with ruthless determination to tighten and increase restrictions on heretofore legal interactions between Americans and Cubans.

Who have they targeted to be most affected by these new rules and regulations? Who is so subversive, so threatening to our national security that they must face tighter and tighter and tighter restrictions on their activities? Well, it is not members of the Cuban Government. Mr. Chairman, it is Cuban families that will suffer as a result of these new policies.

The Bush administration has even gone so far as to redefine what the word "family" means for Cuban-Americans; and it does not include uncles or aunts or cousins or nephews or nieces, let alone your godparents or godchildren or any other member of your extended family. As far as the Bush administration is concerned, if these extended family members are beloved by a Cuban living in America, too bad.

As the sponsors of this amendment have already described, the new Commerce Department policies demand that Cuban-Americans in the United States restrict humanitarian or gift parcels to just one per household in Cuba once a month, rather than a parcel once a month to each individual family member, and while the package may include food, it cannot include seeds so that the family might grow more of their own food or fishing equipment so that they might catch their own food or veterinary medicines and equipment so that a family might care for animals that help them supplement their diet or income.

While the parcel may include medicines, it cannot include personal hygiene items or soap-making equipment; and I would say to my colleagues here, I have the regulations. They are right here in black and white. I am happy to show them to my colleagues and give them to them so they can read.

While Cuban-Americans can send their family members receive-only radios, they cannot send them clothing. Clearly, in the minds of officials at the Commerce Department, listening to Radio Marti is a greater priority for Cuban families than adequate clothing.

Mr. Chairman, our Nation has always placed an emphasis on families, on family values, on the reunification of families. As a Nation of immigrants, we have thrived on supporting our extended families, both those living in the United States with us and family members still struggling to survive in their mother countries.

The new restrictions issued by the Commerce Department make a mockery of this common heritage that binds all Americans together. No matter what any Member of this body believes about the rightness or wrongness of our current policy toward Cuba, and for the record, Mr. Chairman, I believe that our policy is a miserable failure, but no matter what one believes, we should not place the burden and price of those beliefs on Cuban-Americans and their relatives still living on the island.

No constituency in America has fought more fiercely for a free Cuba. Yet, these are the very families Commerce is going to punish.

These new policies were specifically made to isolate Cubans on the island from their relatives in the United States. They were specifically made to increase the hardships faced by those families.

Mr. Chairman, these new policies are cruel, these new policies are inhuman, and these new policies are cold-hearted and their enforcement should not be funded.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote in support of the Flake-Davis amendment.

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